The stormy protests in the aftermath of the Jason Stockley verdict left two particularly vivid images of white women in distress. That’s unusual, because this case was about a white man who said he was going to kill a black man, did kill him 45 seconds later, and then was absolved of first-degree murder by another white man in a bench trial. And when the grief and rage of black people are interpreted through images of white women, bad things tend to happen to black people, especially to black men. But these images of white women must be discussed and understood after the events of Friday, September 15.
One was an older white woman who got trampled – inadvertently, one would hope, but the visual evidence doesn’t look too good – by an approaching line of St. Louis police officers in riot gear. The other was St. Louis’ first woman mayor, whose house was damaged when a protest crowd tried to get her to come out of her house and either talk to them or (in an obvious parody of neighborly civility) loan them a cup of sugar.
The woman trampled by the police – Laura Jones, 63 – was arrested for interfering with a police officer. They claim she was told to move and arrested when she didn’t comply with orders (that is, after a little trampling). Charlie Brennan of KMOX, who would take the side of the police if they trampled his own mother, said he heard the woman telling other protestors she would shield them because “the police won’t bother an old lady.” Message sent: The St. Louis police will bother an “old lady,” even a white older woman, if she stands with the police accountability movement (and won’t move when ordered by police at a protest).
There always is a deep paradox in police policing a protest of police unaccountability. But who else are you gonna call? And if we were to impute some willful aggression to the police officers who walked over this woman – if we are to conjecture that they were doing a little more than “their job” – then they are only acting in their own ruthless self-interest. If enough older white women were to line up with the police accountability movement, its public perception might change and its concerns might advance a little further. If you are a police officer interested in maintaining the status quo or rolling back scrutiny of police work to pre-Obama, pre-Ferguson levels, then that “little old lady” shielding protestors is your enemy.
Again, to be clear, this is a movement that starts with mostly armed black men being killed by heavily armed white men paid – by taxpayers of all races – to protect the public as agents of the government. It’s not about white women. But white women have gotten tangled up in it – even older white women who look like most cops’ grandma – and that changes things in St. Louis and America.
Mike Jones of our editorial board reminds us of Dr. King’s scorn and disappointment at the white moderate who holds back progress, Dr. King came to believe, even more than white supremacists hold back progress. The white moderate is the buffer to the white supremacist – the white moderate shields the white supremacist, much like this courageous woman shielded protestors. White moderates protect white supremacists, even if they are not personally racist.
It would be unfair to pivot from the danger of the white moderate to Mayor Lyda Krewson. People who know her well assure us she is more liberal than her base of supporters in the recent mayoral contest (when she narrowly beat a brash, black female progressive), and she is right now confronting her first major crisis. We do not want this mayor to fail, because we would fail with her, and we believe she should be given an opportunity to show competent, compassionate leadership through a crisis whose proportions are not yet clear.
Krewson individually and politically had next to nothing to do with the Stockley verdict. Then-Gov. John Ashcroft appointed Judge Timothy Wilson, the judge who absolved Stockley (another white Wilson causing St. Louis grief), and Stockley did not work for the city when Krewson was elected mayor. As a veteran alderwoman, she had minimal oversight over police and their training and discipline. But Jason Stockley is her problem now. A judge who interjects a wisecrack about “urban heroin dealers” into a ruling on a capital crime – where he is absolving a white cop who killed an “urban” man who can’t even be charged with dealing heroin, let alone convicted, because a cop killed him before he could search him – is her problem now. A police force that tramples women who look not entirely unlike the mayor herself, because they are protecting protestors, is her problem now.
To be clear: We do not think the mayor is responsible for the Stockley verdict in any way. Though she is a servant of the people, we believe she deserves the privacy of her own home. Further, we think vandalism is a terrible way to advance social change, and a nuisance crime that should be investigated and punished fairly. We think it is wrong to damage the mayor’s home. We also think it is wrong to throw bricks at police officers. We understand the legitimate grief and rage many people rightly feel about the criminal justice system and the police in particular, but physical violence is not the way to proceed. Not even is it wrong in its own right to harm other people, it’s also a losing strategy. If you want to fight the police – physically fight them – you are going to lose in the end, in one way or another.
Above all, though, we side with the protestors in the deeply enraged sense of wrong that put them in the streets: It is wrong for police to keep killing black people. If we right that wrong, the opportunity for all of these others wrongs disappears.
We remind the mayor of what her own appointed interim police chief said to news directors to help prepare them to cover the aftermath of the Stockley verdict: Pay attention to the message of the protestors. Don’t let their noisy – and, at times, destructive and self-destructive – tactics distract you from their message. And what they are telling you is that St. Louis needs more than just more police officers. We also need a police department that is better trained, better disciplined, and held more accountable. The police are paid agents of the government – paid by people of all races – who swore an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution, which extends equal rights and protections to all. Community trust in the police is essential to not only a just society, but to a stable and functioning society, as a string of cancelled public events in St. Louis since the Stockley verdict reminds us. If we don’t make the police more accountable and more worthy of the trust of all people, we will never get out of this hell we are in.
